Apocalypse now

10/10  - Directed by Francis Ford Coppola - 1979 - 153 minutes

Francis Ford Coppola's early career was marked by many successes, most memorably his 1971 film The Godfather which remains the most critically lauded film ever made. But in 1979, a decade after John Milius began writing a loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Coppola released what I consider to be his masterpiece and, moreover, one of the most powerful films I have ever seen. Apocalypse Now is a blend of the surreal, the horrific and the hilarious. The movie is a three hour epic following Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), a cynical covert operative on his second deployment in Vietnam in 1969. After being unable to adjust to civilian life after his time in the war he finds himself back in Saigon where he is tasked with a top secret mission: to travel upriver into Cambodian territory where he is to assassinate a Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), leader of a rogue cult-like guerilla army fighting North Vietnamese forces. As Willard goes upriver via a navy patrol boat, he descends further into madness as he witnesses things more terrible than he has ever imagined, often at the hands of his fellow soldiers.

The film admittedly sacrifices its technical accuracy; as opposed to a later film set in Vietnam like Platoon (1986), Apocalypse Now does not prioritize the details in military protocol or armory. But the film works only because it is willing to reject rigid historical accuracy. Coppola does not presume that his film defines the experience of soldiers deployed in Vietnam; rather, he captures most disturbingly the psychological turmoil of war, allowing the film the creative license to use stylistic, surreal or downright outrageous sequences symbolically.

This is naturally the case in the film’s most famous scene that depicts the deranged Air Cavalry Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) ruthlessly attacking a Vietnamese village before instructing his troops to go surfing in waters off of the village’s beach, still very much a warzone. This sequence does not claim to be literal, but is rather an exaggeration to place its viewer in a world in which all frameworks of humanity and sanity have collapsed. The same should be said for the rest of the film’s “surreal” sequences. 

While Apocalypse Now manages to consistently maintain an astonishingly high standard of quality in its visuals, Vittorio Storaro’s camera and light work is strongest in two key sequences. The first occurs in the final threshold before the patrol boat ventures into Cambodia, a fictional bridge where American troops seem to fight tooth and nail perpetually to maintain their control. The night sky and the shadowy treeline are illuminated only by the harsh bridge light fixtures and the dizzying array of battlefield flares and explosions. The use of light in this scene is so hallucinatory I cannot help feeling like Lance, the patrol boat’s resident surfer who navigates this scene while tripping on LSD. 

It’s not until around an hour later that the film finally escalates to its climax. Willard, having made it to Kurtz’ compound and heard Kurtz describe his own psychological crisis and growing cynicism over humanity, slaughters the rogue Colonel, a scene that is intercut with footage of the surrounding villagers hacking a water buffalo to death. Apocalypse Now’s climax is an enrapturing experience of high contrast light and shadow, of hellish oranges and yellows, a visceral montage of human cruelty reminiscent of the work of Sergei Eisenstein.

Apocalypse Now is not about Vietnam in the conventional sense. Taking it as fact or reality is not only an unfavorable way to watch this movie, but a dangerous one. Apocalypse Now immerses its viewer not in history, but in the maddened eyes of killers living in a nightmare that reeks of death.